Will U.S. Success In Cutting Greenhouse Gases Kill The Paris Climate Deal?

Should it? Yes. Will it? No. Maybe it will be called something else instead. But the purpose has nothing to do with "climate change": and everything to do with extracting as much money from the US as possible. That idea will continue even if the US never emits another pollutant again.

The longer term goal is the control of everything on earth by a few tyrants.

The output of so-called greenhouse gases continued to fall during President Trump's initial year in office, new Environmental Protection Agency data show. This demonstrates once again the wisdom of Trump's decision to stop listening to the global warming Chicken Littles and withdraw the U.S. from the costly and ineffective Paris Climate deal.

The EPA sampled more than 8,000 large factories and found that emissions of greenhouse gases had dropped 2.7% from 2016 to 2017. Most of the decline was due to reductions in CO2.

"The Trump Administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions," said EPA action Administrator Andrew Wheeler. "While many around the world are talking about reducing greenhouse gases, the U.S. continues to deliver, and today's report is further evidence of our action-oriented approach."

This is no one-off, freak decline. Output of gases that can contribute to global warming have fallen sharply in recent years. It's a result of the fracking revolution producing enormous amounts of cheap, clean, plentiful natural gas — which has increasingly replaced coal and oil for energy production.

Largely as a result of the new energy revolution in the U.S., per person greenhouse gas emissions fell to a 67-year low during 2017. To put that in further perspective, the last time we were this low, Harry S Truman was president, and neither Alaska nor Hawaii were states yet.

Greenhouse Gases Going, Going...

Nor is this an isolated success story, some kind of statistical legerdemain due only to fracking. The truth is, the U.S. has dramatically reduced all pollutants in its air since 1970, EPA data show. Yes, regulations deserve some credit for this. But high oil prices and technology deserve more. They spurred businesses and individuals to conserve on energy in new and innovative ways.

As we wrote in early August, "From 1970 to 2017, the six major pollutants monitored by the EPA plunged by 73%. By comparison, during that time the U.S.' economy grew 262% and its population by 60%.

That didn't include CO2 output, which has plunged by 29% since peaking in 2007.

America 'Decarbonizes'

Moreover, this follows a long-term trend of "decarbonization" of the U.S. economy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that the amount of energy used produce a million dollars of GDP has plunged from 1,091 metric tons of CO2 in 1950 to just 301 metric tons of CO2 in 2017, a decline of 72%. But just since 2008, it's dropped just under 20%.

The truth is, the U.S. is becoming increasingly energy efficient and climate-friendly, even by the absurd standards of the radical environmentalists in the European Union bureaucracy and at the UN.

Meanwhile, as The Daily Caller notes, "globally, greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise to historic highs by the end of the year, despite nearly 200 countries signing the Paris climate accord. Global greenhouse gas emissions also rose in 2017."

Go figure. The one country whose air is getting cleaner while its economy grows walked away from the Paris climate deal.

Moreover, data from oil giant BP show "the U.S. led the world in emissions cuts for the ninth time this century," while in the EU, "emissions were ... up (1.5%)."

In short, virtually none of the signatories of the Paris Climate Accord are living up to their bold pledges to reduce output of greenhouse gases. The deal is no deal at all. It's a dead letter.

Will We Always Have Paris?

Which raises a question. How long will it be before dozens of individual countries walk away from the disastrous, unworkable Paris Climate deal?

After all, the Paris deal has tied the hands of those who signed it, forcing draconian, arbitrary cuts in greenhouse gases on countries that can't afford it or don't have the technical means to reduce CO2 output. And the deal does nothing to halt emissions from the two fastest-growing greenhouse gas polluters in the world: China and India. It's a travesty.

Soon, smart countries will adopt the U.S. greenhouse gas model, and drop the Paris model.

This shouldn't come as any surprise. As the far-left leaders of the global green movement have themselves said, climate change isn't their real concern.

They're more interested in getting successful free-market nations to abandon capitalism in favor of a global top-down socialist system. In that system, individual rights and wealth would perish, and government permission would be required to do almost anything.

It's the nightmare that Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea and any number of other socialist nations live with today. Trump's wisdom in walking away from the rotten Paris deal becomes more obvious by the day.

_________________Owning guns isn't a right. If it was a right it would be in the Constitution.-- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez